“The assignment is really whatever we want to do but it has to be two projects at once. I’m deciding to do an acrylic self-portrait and a watercolor landscape of a fantasy world that I’ve created. I haven’t worked much with acrylic so I’m hoping that I’ll get better at that through this assignment and I don’t draw landscapes that often so working on this will also help me with that.”
“So I’m going to college for architectural design and basically I was doing research on it and the hardest part about the program at Wentworth is building the house models for the house that you design and I wanted to do this so I could get ahead of the curb in the classes there.”
“These students come to me with solid experience in researching and developing their own project, so this is a great opportunity for them and for me to work with them because they have an interest, they have a desire to make art. I think this kind of a class is so important at Thornton because we have so many talented visual artists that do go on to major in art programs or to work in the creative professions. When students come back to visit us, we often hear that these kinds of classes actually help them in the work world. In this class I really feel like I’m their art coach because they’ve had other teachers that have taught them skills that help them get here. We have a wonderful program, we’re so fortunate to have the electives that we do.”
“We put photos and reference pictures in our planning for a few reasons. Part of an advance classes is the ability to plan a piece and make what you originally plan, and having those images or your original inspirations help.”
She continues by explaining that students take inspirations from other artists and so they put their pictures in their notebooks to see how successful artists have used techniques.
“It’s part of the ‘good artist copy, great artist steal’ methodology,” Anna explains.
“For my concentration, I’m doing a series of portraits of people as their favorite animals, so last I did Laney as a possum and Hanright as a bear.”
“I’m thinking that this is going to be some gender expectation bending which means that it’s women doing things that are traditionally masculine and then men doing things that are traditionally feminine.”
She plans on accomplishing this by using feminine colors and patterns in a picture of someone doing masculine activities.
“For my first project, I wanted to work with portraits using charcoal and do it on newspaper. I really liked how the words and artwork went together and part of the goal is to get better at portrait studies and using richer values to convey emotion.”
“My theme is my childhood memories so I’m going to do 12 painting of a girl doing different things in the forest.”
“The sewing machine was rough while I was working on these first few. It kept jamming up and I really needed help from my mom, and I’m really lucky because she used to be a seamstress and so is her grandmother. She told me she’s really happy I’m starting to sew because it’s like a family tradition.”
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